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No chance backgammon

Posted By: Daniel Murphy
Date: Saturday, 25 September 2010, at 5:12 a.m.

In Response To: No chance backgammon (Jakob Garal)

It's hard to know exactly what Jacob is going on about, but the following excerpt from William Poundstone's book Prisoner's Dilemma (1992) may be relevant and of interest:

[John] von Neumann and Princeton economics Oskar Morgenstern published their analysis in 1944 as Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.

The first thing to realize about von Neumann's "game theory" is that it is only tangentially about games in the usual sense. The word "strategy," as commonly used, better suggests what game theory is about. In The Ascent of Man, scientist Jacob Bronowski (who worked with von Neumann during World War II) recalls von Neumann's explanation during a taxi ride in London:

... I naturally said to him, since I am an enthusiastic chess player, "You mean, the theory of games like chess." "No, no," he said. "Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now real games," he said, "are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.

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